So I went to the NCBI blast page and did a BLASTP search. Blastp searches a peptide against a database of peptides and identifies in the database sequences if one or more have similar amino-acid sequences to the one used to search (which is known as the query) . To make this work, I had to adjust some of the default parameters to make it possible to better detect short matches (I raised the # of expected matches to 10000).

Alas, no good matches convincing matches to known or predicted proteins came up. So I was sad. Then I said, what if Darwin was hiden in the genome of some organism? So I did a "translational" blast search called tblastn which takes a peptide and searches it against a DNA database and translates the DNA into all possible peptides it could encode. When one does this, one can possibly find "hidden" proteins or relics of proteins in the DNA that may not have been labelled as proteins by whomever analzyed the DNA data.

And what did I find by this Tblastn search? A jackpot to make evolutionary biologists VERY happy. The best matches for CHARLESDARWIN the peptide? Pan troglodytes. AKA Chimps. And humans (the matches were equally strong).

So - hidden in the human and Chimp genomes is a relic of one Charles Darwin. Happy Birthday Charlie.